Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Protest from Sweden: "You do not have the universal right to represent me"

The Afro-Swedes are tired of the racist depiction of blackness in the Swedish children's film Little Pink and the Motley Crew. So Oivvio Polite (photo above) and Staffan Carlsson launched a website to protest against these representations. Statement:

In response to the recent controversy over the cultural meanings of the depiction of blackness in the film Little Pink and the Motley Crew, we launch this site to enable the black diaspora and other people of color to express resistance against white refusals to acknowledge that its representation of racial diversity can be regarded as stereotypical and offensive. Since there are very few public arenas for challenging white hegemony, we would like to offer an opportunity for you to have your say in the matter. The strategy is to gather images of people countering the claim that stereotypes can be detached from a history of racist representations.

5 comments:

Amen...and I think it needs to be said again, YOU DO NOT HAVE THE UNIVERSAL MANDATE TO REPRESENT ME!

I swear, it just seems like the "whiter" the country and their attachment to that whiteness, the greater the need to extremely other-ize non-white bodies. "Black" people come in vanilla, olive, beige, yellow, tawny, bronze, copper, cinnamon, mahogany, chocolate, opal and bluish black. Seriously, WE ARE THE RAINBOW...even in Sweden! There are mixed race people of every color combination; there are Sub-Saharan Africans and East Africans who also come in a variety of phenotypes. I don't see why it's so difficult for us to be represented as such. UNLESS, there is something to be gained by the otherization of non-white bodies.

BlkViking, please contribute, if you like. You are free to expose as much or as littl of yourself as you like. The page www.notyourmotleycrew.com shows you how to go trhough the steps of uploading your own image, and also offers three alternative formulations. Of course, you can also choose your own statement.

North Europeans as predominantly "extreme" Phenotypes absorbed the capitalist and imperialist driven "one drop rule", developped in the US also by North Europeans, readily. Unfortunately even many good willing people are subconscionsly infected by it. The North European antiblack racism contrasts to Arab antiblack racism, which ignores (also in an arrogant way) the black ancestral part of an Afro Arab provided the person is of "right believe" and having an Arab father, but turns against the unmixed black people.It´s a long way (unfortunately)Andreas SchlüterSociologistBerlin, Germanyhttp://wipokuli.wordpress.com